Fearless depiction of a tapestry of ills

By Maureen Isaacson The powerful stories in An Elegy for Easterly, Petina Gappah's debut short story collection, reflect contemporary Zimbabwe in a variety of its aspects. Here is the squalor of those oppressed by Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF, as well as those who have been crushed by a rising middle class which visits suffering on its own and on those left floundering beneath it. The stories, which mercifully make no gesture towards solving the problems of a country depicted in various stages of implosion, are peopled by the downtrodden and their oppressors. On show in Gappah's tapestry of ills is a display of bigotry as well as the obvious demons of poverty, Aids and corruption. Edna, in the story At the Sound of the Last Post, embarrasses herself at the funeral of her brother, who is hailed by the president as a fallen hero of the liberation movement. Twenty-one years ago when the narrator, who was the deceased's wife, announced that she wanted to leave him, Edna said, Good riddance. She had considered the narrator "a mhanje, the lowest form of womanhood, mhanje being a barren woman, a woman without issue, unproductive, a fruitless husk". But as we discover, it was the faithless husband, like many of his countrymen, who was the rotten egg and who earned his place in history through sycophancy in a political world where "pompous nothingness" is of the essence. A fan of the musician Oliver Mtukudzi, Gappah makes frequent reference to his music in her stories and she defends him against his critics, who decry his failure to take a stand about Zimbabwean politics. Perhaps, says Gappah, "his stand is not to take a stand. How do you know he is not a Zanu supporter? What if he is an MDC supporter?" She has said that his music binds both parties. Gappah, who studied law at the University of Zimbabwe under Tendai Biti, the current Zimbabwean finance minister, whose Marxist-Leninist cell she joined, describes herself as "tolerant" now. "I lost so many friendships in the past because people were affiliated to Zanu-PF. If Morgan (Tsvangirai) and Mugabe can sit down together, then I too can overcome my differences." She is, however, less tolerant of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan writer and activist, who was reluctant to speak out against Mugabe's regime when his latest novel, The Wizard of the Crow, was published in South Africa in 2006. The novel is about dictatorship and the Zimbabwean flag is incorporated into the cover illustration, she says. "While I could not be expected, for instance, to comment on Nigerian politics, Ngugi can be expected to speak about Zimbabwe." Gappah is enraged by Ngugi's insistence in the essay Decolonising the Mind that Africans write in the vernacular: "Ngugi nearly ruined my life!" she says. "In my early 20s, Decolonising was among the books that influenced me, with Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and Marx and Engels's Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. At that stage, I took to heart what I read. "For two years I tried to follow his dictum, but I found that I could not express myself as well in Shona as I could in English. He (Wa Thiong'o) assumes that English is a foreign language to the African writer - which is like saying that the African writer should be writing with a stick in the sand and drumming out his message instead of using a laptop and computer." But Gappah wants an audience, and she is unafraid of the public eye. An excellent mimic, she fancies herself as a stand-up comic in another life. When she returns home to Harare from Geneva, where she works as a counsel for an organisation that provides legal aid to developing countries, she defies the warnings of her mother, Simbiso Gappah, against speaking too freely because nobody can be trusted these days. She has said that, like Steve Biko, she writes what she likes. She says she is unafraid. "Intelligence people do not read fiction. They know exactly who they are looking for." Gappah reserves polemics for newspaper columns and in these stories she explores the techniques of fiction. The beneficiary of "a superb education system", which she reminds me was Mugabe's doing when he came to power in 1980, she says she believes that Mugabe succumbed to pressure and that it suited him to do so. This is not the whole story. "Zimbabweans are victims of each other. I look at the way they treat their women, their servants, their sisters-in-law." Thus we are spared the reductionism of Afro-pessimism, the frightened jeers from the gallery of Europe where Gappah holds "the cushy job". No schadenfreude for the woman whose parents remain at home. She has not diverted her gaze from the squalor and the brutality of say "Operation Marambatsvina" (Restore Order), Zanu-PF's demolition of the homes of an estimated 700 000 Zimbabweans in August 2005, which finds expression in the title story, An Elegy for Easterly. But we are invited into the heart of a community and its own brutal conflicts. In In the Heart of the Golden Triangle, the narrator says, "You call your maid Joyce and she calls you Madam… Madei stole my Ferragamo shoes, you say. This happened five years ago but the incident still rankles. Joyce is not Madei, she is coming along nicely, you hope because you could not bear to go through another maid; you have been through thirty-five." Gappah says: "I have tried to show that the real danger in Zimbabwe is not Robert Mugabe, it is the black middle class." Addressing the woman in this story, who is steeped in the meaningless privilege for which she has sold her soul to her unfaithful husband, the narrator bristles. The woman's son attends a school too costly for the president's son, he attends piano class and misses most of the notes and he is a bully. But her vision is clouded by the world she shares with others whose own teenage ambitions are forgotten. "Fame is an elastic concept, especially in a place like this, where we all know the smells of each other's armpits," says the narrator of The Mupandawana Dancing Champion, the story about M'dhara Vitalis Mukaro, who made his name as the best coffin-maker and the Mupandawana Dancing Champion (MDC) in the year that the price of everything went up 97 times and forced him out of retirement. The enthusiastic crowd who gave him a standing ovation realised all too late "that he would never get up and that he was not dancing but dying". It is surely wishful thinking on behalf of the provincial governor that the MDC will in fact dance itself to death. He complains that Mukaro's boss, the MP for the area, has promoted "the opposition... who understand that the land is the economy..." Gappah is pleased that I can determine her young, grappling authorial self in some of the stories. At 36 she has a young son, Kush, who she says means more to her than her newfound writing career and she feels young still. She is not married "yet" and she is indeed youthful, if not naive. A first-timer on a grand author tour, she says she is concerned that she has not yet developed a writerly persona such as that of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Oh please. She is humbled by the enthusiastic international reception of An Elegy. Her agent had sent the stories to Faber and Faber along with her upcoming novel, The Book of Memory. It is about an Albino woman who recollects her life as she faces the death penalty in Harare's notorious Chikurube Prison. Gappah's own journey has allowed her to witness the chaos of post-independent Zimbabwe. Her paternal grandmother, who took care of her in Mashivingu when she was a toddler, burned her "dolls" which were made of corn cobs. Whatever money was earned by her father, Tererai Gappah, a teller at Barclays who worked his way up the ladder to become an internal auditor, went to educating his sisters. Similarly, she has educated three of her four siblings. "I was 10 when independence came and my father was able to realise his dream and move into a white suburb. We moved from Glenora township to Cotswold Hills. I attended the Alfred Beit school, then a white school before it became mixed, and it was brutal! The kids would laugh at my hair. But I started running and became the fastest runner in the school. "I went on to St Dominic's and St Ignatius, which was a Jesuit School. There were 400 boys and only 40 girls, the brightest in the country, who were brought in to civilise the boys. I came top of the class, I was driven. "I was a scholarship kid. I graduated from Cambridge with an LLM. My PhD was in international trade law and the relationship between trade and investment. I wanted to dismantle the World Trade Organisation. I went to work for it and discovered that it is good for developing countries. No, I am no longer a Marxist, and do not believe in any 'isms'." The stories came slowly, over time, she says. "I was sick with depression at the time I was writing them, in about 2006, and I realised that when I paid less attention to news from home, I felt better." To those who say she is not equipped to write about Zimbabwe, because she lives elsewhere, she says: "I am there! When the geyser blows, I am the one who gets it fixed." Published on the web by Sunday Independent on May 23, 2009. © Sunday Independent 2009. All rights reserved.